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Written by Martin Sieff; Originally appeared on strategic-culture.org
The people of Hong Kong enjoy one of the highest standards of livings of any city across continental Asia. Since peacefully being reabsorbed into mainland China in 1997, they have confounded endless Western Prophets of Doom: These falsely claimed that Beijing would not maintain its solemn undertakings for peace and security in the city and territory. They maintained that Hong Kong’s historic position as one of the great business hubs of Asia and the world would rapidly be destroyed. Nothing of the sort happened.
But the prosperity of Hong Kong for generations to come is danger now – and the threat manifestly does not come from Beijing.
The mass protests for greater democracy and freedom continue. And following a grim dynamic that goes back well over two centuries to the French Revolution they can never be satisfied.
The more that the administration of Hong Kong led by Carrie Lam and the national Chinese government in Beijing seek to avoid the undue use of force and the infliction of casualties, the more violent, the demonstrations slowly and remorselessly become, the broader and more sweeping are their demands for political liberties – though these are invariably vague and ill-defined.
I predict here – simply and clearly – that no matter how many concessions allegedly for liberty are given they will never satisfy the protestors and the Western governments who at the very least are using them as political puppets and pawns. All that can possibly be achieved is to create an atmosphere of fear, insecurity and violence: That is toxic to attract both Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and also regular investment from the rest of China.
Therefore Hong Kong’s economy will founder, while unemployment and economic suffering will grow. Then, those suffering from it will be encouraged to blame the very government that has sought so long and so hard to prevent disasters from happening.
I speak with a particular authority on these matters: Half a century ago as a teenage Irish boy, I watched the same kind of protests destroy forever the peace and prosperity of one of the most advanced industrial centers on the face of the planet in the city of Belfast.
The lessons I learned then would serve the people of Hong Kong well today before they bring an unimaginable disaster upon themselves.
For popular violent protests against authorities never bring peace: They only bring war – Almost always on a scale that none of the protestors dreamed of when they took to the streets.
Prosperity never follows. At best there is mass unemployment and despair as local businesses and national investment flee the territory for decades and generations. You do not build factories and hire workers for them when the factory will be burned down in one of the endless clashes that will soon follow.
The “freedom” that the protestors demand is illusory. It is fools’ gold: It is the fantasy of wealth at the end of the rainbow that is never found.
Hong Kong’s enormous economic advantage for nearly 180 years under first British and over the past two decades of enlightened Chinese autonomous rule has been that it has been a secure, predictable and safe place to do business with the Mainland and with the wider region.
But that is no longer true: The longer the protests rage and the wider and more serious they become, the more that incalculable advantage is eroded before our eyes.
When I was a young boy, my father on Sunday mornings proudly took me down to the Harland & Woolf Shipyard on Queen’s Island to see some of the biggest moving vehicles in the world – giant cargo vessels, tankers, aircraft carriers and cruise ships – being built.
My father was proud of his son, but he was proud of his city too: Belfast was still the largest ship building center on earth. The great shipyard at its peak employed 35,000 workers. Enormous rivers of humanity would flow back and forth on the bridge over the River Lagan every day as its workers streamed to and from their labors. But for most of the past 50 years, almost all of it has become an industrial wasteland peopled only by ghosts.
Peace finally returned to Northern Ireland after 30 years of civil strife, but it was too late. The great shipyard never recovered and it never revived. What had been done could not be undone.
If these riots continue, that will be the fate of Hong Kong too. Nearly two centuries of growth and prosperity will wither and die.
This is no wild prediction. It is tantamount to a mathematical inevitability: There is a remorseless tidal wave of fate to the pattern of rising political protests that escalate into a violent revolution that can only be contained by the use of military force.
The Civil War in Northern Ireland raged – sometimes horrifically, sometimes more subdued – from 1968 to the landmark Good Friday Agreement of 1998. My old, dear friend, British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam was the key figure driving the negotiations. She undermined her health doing so. Then a host of political parasites from US President Bill Clinton to British Prime Minister Tony Blair were eager to hog all the praise and credit for themselves years later as Mo lay dying from a brain tumor.
The decades that followed the collapse of law and order in Ireland in 1968-1972 were the darkest in the island’s troubled history since the Great Famine of the 1840s. The British government’s record of secret manipulation and involvement in dark excesses and crimes during those years gives London no moral standing today to lecture China on how it handles the unrest in Hong Kong, or anywhere else.
I never expected to see the end of apparently endless war in Ireland in my own lifetime. Thanks to Mo Mowlam’s selfless labors and those of countless other British and Irish figures great and small, peace finally came. The protestors of Hong Kong too now need to take a step back, suck in a deep breath and pause to think long and hard before they charge down that same doomed and awful path.
The large mass of’peaceful protesters will eventually diminish, but the cadre of ‘violent’ protesters (rioters) under CIA/NED direction will continue their provocations until the US tells them to stop … I wonder how many are getting payment from the Americans.
I feel sorry for the majority of Hong Kongers, but we know it a coup, designed with the intention of ruining HK, by the US of A (and maybe my UK), led by gullible youths who of course get a nice paycheck.
Traitors should be hung.
Lam was couping them.
…”maybe…”?
You forgot america western jews in Your infamity.
Didn’t the US tax funded National Endowment for Democracy NGO, fund, support and train the protest leader of the Hong Kong branch?
Didn’t the US tax payer funded National Endowment for Democracy NGO, fund, support and train Navalny, over in Russia, and his protests?
Didn’t the US tax payer funded National Endowment for Democracy NGO, fund, support and train Guiado, over in Venezueals, who assumes himself the President of Venezuela, despite having no votes cast.
What I find interesting is the fact that Victoria Nuland, is married to Robert Kagan, who along with Elliot Abrams and William Krystol, set up PNAC.
Elliot Abrams who was one of the creators of the Iraq War, back in 2003, plus, his war crimes, over in Honduras, who is now the US Ambassador to Venezuela, courtesy of Trump. He is also on the Board of Directors, of the US tax payer funded, National Endowment for Democracy NGO, NED. So no conflicts of interest are there?
Victoria Nuland, who was over in Ukraine, handing out the cookies, with the other cookie monster John McCain, when they were trying to kickstart The Maidan Protests. Is there a difference between the tax payer funded, NED NGO and the tax payer funded Soros ‘Open Society’ NGO?
So Victoria Nuland, who was so loyal to Hilary Clinton and Soros, and the DNC, just happens to be married to one of the founders of PNAC. Dems and Republicans, just like Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour, are must snakes, with multi-heads. Whose main aim is to play us all.
……………………
Elliott Abrams: A Human Rights Horror Show in Three Acts
‘…Act II: Neoconned
In 1997, prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a think tank dedicated to “the promotion of American global leadership.” PNAC’s roster featured many neocon hawks who would later serve in the George W. Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Elliot Abrams, who was appointed Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council in June 2001. Many of PNAC’s goals — which included regime change in Iraq — aligned perfectly with George W. Bush’s aggressive post-9/11 foreign policy and PNAC members including Abrams found their power and standing elevated as the US entered the era of never-ending war on terrorism.
…As Bush’s special Middle East adviser, Abrams was one of the key intellectual architects of the 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. He had long been an enthusiastic advocate of overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime, co-authoring a 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton urging regime change in Baghdad. Iraq wasn’t the only Middle Eastern nation that Abrams helped destabilize. The staunch Zionist, who ran the NSC’s Israel/Palestine desk, has been accused of leading the Bush administration’s effort to subvert the 2006 Palestinian elections to block the formation of a Fatah-Hamas unity government. “It was during Abrams’ tenure in the NSC that the United States lost all credibility as an honest broker among Palestinians,” Eric Alterman wrote in The Nation in 2013…’ https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/01/elliott-abrams-a-human-rights-horror-show-in-three-acts/
Because they are YOUNG, they don’t understand what will happen to their country once they keep pushing events in this direction, once the coup it’s 100% completed it’s over for them, they will depend entirely on Foreigners who will push any laws or ideology that they want onto them, military control would be also lost and handed to foreigners.
shut off internet in HK – done.
switch it over to chinese back bone (filtered by the Great Wall firewalls).
Once WW3 is over, with America a smoking ruin, and Russia’s military destroyed, China will take the entirety of eastern Russia.
So you don’t think China wont be dragged into a global conflict?
of course, but they’ll hold back to some degree, unlike Russia/U.S.
Interesting article, especially comparing the events of Northern Ireland, with the events in Hong Kong. Operation Gladio, so comes to mind and regime change scripts, run by the same old crowd, including the creation of the IRA.
They all use the same script, the same actions, the same uniforms, the same banners/flags and symbology. Controlled by exactly the same crowd.
Was it the English people, who were illiterate, poor, living amongst the open sewers, and with the kids working down the local work house, who caused Ireland’s problems? Or was it the elite, and their masters, so loyal to the City of London, who caused the ‘divide and conquer’ regime change scripts, both in Ireland and also Hong Kong, not forgetting how it worked over in Ukraine and how they are trying to kick start them in Russia and Venezuela.
Guess we are not meant to notice, how they have no Plan B to fall back on.